The challenge with any beloved children’s classic is how to bring it to the screen while preserving what made it special in the first place.
The Faraway Tree books are particularly challenging in this regard because so much of their charm lies in Blyton’s prose and in the reader’s own imagination. Each reader has their own vision of what Moonface looks like, how the slippery-slip feels, and what Pop Cakes taste like. The magical lands exist in the space of childhood imagination where anything is possible, and nothing needs to be over-explained.
Yet the core themes of the Faraway Tree stories – the hunger for adventure, the importance of friendship, the celebration of both the natural world and our imaginations, and the idea that wonder can be found if you just know where to look – are timeless. Every generation of children faces the same challenge of growing up in a world that often seems determined to extinguish imagination and play. Every generation needs to be reminded that magic is real if you choose to believe in it.
The journey to bring The Magic Faraway Tree to cinemas began nearly two decades ago, when producer Pippa Harris at Neal Street Productions first recognised the cinematic potential in Blyton’s enchanted world. “I got in touch with the publishers to get the option 18 years ago,” she notes. “It was a book I’d read as a kid; the first one I read to myself. And then, when I became a mum, I read it to my daughter, and then she read it by herself when she got a bit older. It has very much been part of my life and something I’ve always wanted to make as a movie.”
During the negotiation process, the Blyton estate was sold to Hachette. After the sale, Harris, now joined by fellow producer Nicolas Brown, made a new approach and optioned the books in 2013.
The Neal Street duo then took the project to Danny Perkins, who at the time headed up StudioCanal in the UK. Perkins and StudioCanal had recently made Paddington, which had demonstrated the appetite for quintessentially British family films that honoured their source material while speaking to contemporary audiences. “We hadn’t released Paddington yet, but we were looking for other films in a similar sphere,” Perkins says. “I’d always loved The Magic Faraway Tree. It had been my sister’s favourite book, and we had grown up with it.”
Based on the beloved The Faraway Tree series of novels for children, The Magic Faraway Treefollows Polly and Tim and their children Beth, Joe and Fran – a modern family who find themselves forced to relocate to the remote English countryside. Soon after their arrival, with no Wi-Fi or electricity to charge their treasured electronic gadgets, the children must develop an interest in the great outdoors. Exploring the natural world around their new home, the children discover a magical tree and its extraordinary and eccentric residents, including cherished characters Moonface, Silky, Dame Washalot and Saucepan Man. At the top of the tree, they are transported to spectacular and fantastical lands, and, through the joys and challenges of their adventures, the family learn to reconnect and value each other for the first time in years.
The Write Stuff
With the rights and development funding secured, the search began for a writer who could crack the adaptation – someone who understood both the reverence required for a beloved classic and the need to make it feel fresh and relevant for modern families.
Simon Farnaby had built his reputation primarily in adult comedy, working with the Them There collective on shows like Horrible Histories, Yonderland, and Ghosts, and co-writing films like Mindhorn.
He appeared as an actor in the original Paddington film, playing security guard Barry, but it was his co-writing work with director Paul King on Paddington 2 that revealed his gift for family storytelling. The critically acclaimed sequel, which earned BAFTA nominations for both Best Adapted Screenplay and Outstanding British Film, proved that Farnaby’s wit and warmth could translate beautifully to children’s cinema.
Having worked closely with him on the Paddington films, Perkins saw in Farnaby someone who understood how to adapt cherished children’s literature without sacrificing its soul. “I started talking to Simon about writing it way back then, and the development process was a long one,” he says.
“We just thought he was perfect when we met him over a decade ago,” adds Harris. “He loved the book, and I think reacted in the same way we had. He loved the idea of a book that celebrates childhood imagination and nature. His script isn’t preachy about the dangers of tech, but it’s saying you have to strike a balance. Any good childhood will need to have some tech in it, but it also needs time for kids to go and run wild in a forest.”
For Farnaby, the project arrived at a moment when he was questioning how children’s entertainment had evolved – or perhaps devolved – in the digital age. “When I was a kid, all I did was play in the woods, to the point where my parents never knew where I was,” laughs Farnaby. “I suppose I wanted that feeling of the magic of childhood to come across, that you should put your devices down and go and play in the woods.
Farnaby was confident he could riff upon the fantastical elements of Blyton’s stories, but it was this aspect of the story, unlocked to him by his wife, Claire Keelan, that gave him a handle on his adaptation. In fact, during the writing process it was the pandemic that crystallized something for Farnaby about what children were missing. Like so many parents watching their kids navigate lockdown through screens, he’d seen firsthand the hunger for something more tactile, more immediate, and wilder.
This concern about children’s disconnection from nature and unstructured play became woven into the fabric of Farnaby’s adaptation. The Thompsons are a family struggling with the very modern problem of too much screen time, too little connection, and the loss of childhood wonder to the digital world. The discovery of the Faraway Tree becomes not only an adventure, but a kind of healing.
“I knew the tree would take care of itself in a way,” Farnaby says. “I knew we’d have Silky, Moonface and Mr Watzisname. I had confidence in the lands we’d visit. But a movie has to have a heart. The books are adventures, and they’re episodic and they really are great, but there’s no overarching development to it, emotionally.”
The episodic nature of Blyton’s books presented both an opportunity and a challenge. With four novels to draw from, each containing multiple adventures in different lands, Farnaby had an abundance of material. The task involved selecting which magical lands to include and how to create a cohesive narrative arc between them that would sustain a feature film while preserving the whimsical, exploratory spirit of the books.
“Simon has an amazing ability to make something funny and truthful, and to make it sentimental and heartfelt without it being cheesy or clichéd,” notes Claire Foy, who would come to be cast as Polly, the mum of the Thompson family. “You’re crying and laughing at the same time. He’s always thinking of ways to make it better, different, funnier, all the time. He’s in the movie, and he has written the movie, so he’s never not working at it.”
Adds Andrew Garfield, who plays Tim: “He’s so precise with his writing and yet so open and fluid to people making it their own. He’ll take an idea and make it a thousand times funnier and better and more human. This was the funniest script I’ve ever read, and the themes were very close to my heart: getting back in touch with nature and remembering our connection to nature.”
Finding A Director
The search for a director who could bring Farnaby’s script to life led back to another familiar collaborator. Ben Gregor had been working with Neal Street on the historical drama Britannia, where he’d proven himself a skilled and imaginative visual storyteller capable of balancing epic scale with intimate character moments. The fantasy series, set in 43 AD during the Roman invasion of Britain, required exactly the kind of world-building sensibility that The Magic Faraway Tree would demand, creating believable magic within grounded human stories.
Gregor and Farnaby had known each other for years through the comedy world, sharing a similar sensibility about how humour and heart must coexist. When the producers shared Farnaby’s script for The Magic Faraway Tree with him, Gregor’s response was immediate and enthusiastic.
“We met a lot of directors who said they really loved the script,” recalls Perkins. “But when we met Ben, he told us everything he didn’t like about it, and what he thought he could improve upon. He knew Simon from way back and he understood Blyton’s themes and the world of the film.”
For Gregor, the project touched something deeply personal. He had grown up with
Blyton’s books – or rather, he had desperately wanted to. His sister had owned a wellworn copy of The Magic Faraway Tree, and the young Gregor had been fascinated by it, though access was strictly controlled. “I wasn’t allowed to read it,” he laughs. “My sister really defended her Blyton books, so it had this kind of forbidden quality. It was amazing to finally be allowed to read it.”
In fact, Gregor was on the set of Britannia when he first received the screenplay. He recalls filming that day with an eagle that, like any primo thespian, had a strict hard-out for the day at 5PM. As his crew rushed to set up shots in order to beat the eagle’s roosting deadline, Gregor eagerly turned the pages on the script. “I was completely torn between not being able to stop reading it and having to hurry up with the eagle,” he says. “It just felt so imaginative, and so impossible to film.”
Of course, Gregor took this last part as a challenge. “I just really wanted to get involved in trying to figure out how to do it.”
The challenge was considerable, perhaps even daunting. How do you create a film that honours the ambition and scale of Blyton’s imagination while keeping it grounded in character and emotion? How do you build entire magical worlds that feel real and lived-in, and not just spectacular set pieces designed to dazzle? The lands at the top of the tree – from the chaotic wonder of the Land of Birthdays to the unsettling order of Dame Snap’s eternal school – each needed to feel like a complete world with its own internal logic and visual language, while coalescing as a whole.
Crucial to the realisation of Gregor’s eventual vision was finding a producer who was imaginative and experienced enough to take on the challenge of delivering it on a relatively modest budget. Perkins had worked with producer Jane Hooks of Perfume Pictures on the film The Greatest Days. The experience had been so positive that Perkins was determined to work with Hooks again, and The Magic Faraway
Tree felt like the perfect project to match her skillset.
“Bringing it all together was a huge undertaking,” Perkins explains. “Jane was brilliant at that, in concert with the team at Neal Street. It became a great, complementary team of producers to achieve a scale for an independent production that felt unprecedented.”
But beyond the huge task of conceiving and delivering so many different worlds on time and on budget, the crucial question for a family film in the modern era was: how do you make it feel both timeless and contemporary, honouring the source material while having it speak to today’s families and children?
“Ben has extraordinary imagination,” says Harris. “He understands well that for an audience to buy into the spectacle, they need to be rooted in the characters’ journeys; that’s the thing that takes them through. So, he concentrated on working with the actors and getting the best possible performances out of them while at the same time the other half of his brain was creating around them this beautiful series of worlds that they go into.”
“The first step was to preserve all the ambition and not simplify it,” explains Gregor. “Of course, that led to dropped jaws all over the place. It meant embracing the words, ‘I don’t know.’ As an independent movie, we had to be really clever, but we also had to be really ambitious.”
It helped that Gregor and Farnaby had worked together before. “They share a sensibility, so that was such a helpful shorthand to have,” notes Brown. “It’s also a relationship clearly based on huge mutual respect, which is not always the case between writers and directors!”
“I’ve known Ben for a long time through comedy,” says Farnaby. “He’s very relaxed and he doesn’t ever make things stressful. A film or television set can be a stressful place, but he always manages to make it fun, and his enthusiasm is very infectious. He knows comedy, he loves it, and he’s an enormous well of emotion. He’s always making himself cry.”
“Ben is basically a giant child, in the best possible sense,” smiles Foy. “He makes everyone excited about the world. He has such a sense of humour and lightness to him, and he really gets the emotional context of the film and wants it to be embedded in reality too. I don’t quite know how he lived in both of those worlds, but he did it.”
“He’s a very unique, detailed comedian of a director,” adds Rebecca Ferguson, who plays Dame Snap. “He has a very astute and sensitive reaction to a scene, when it comes to timing, humour, breath work, singing…”
Ferguson laughs: “He made me realise I was being funny sometimes when it wasn’t my own choice; I was actually just copying him. All my acting was basically just me copying Ben!”
Gregor’s approach to the production was fundamentally collaborative, built on the principle that everyone involved, from the costume designers to the set builders to the visual effects team, should feel like co-creators rather than executors of a predetermined vision. He wanted The Magic Faraway Tree to feel handmade, crafted with care and imagination by a community of artists all working toward the same magical goal.
This wasn’t just directorial philosophy, but rather a practical filmmaking strategy. Gregor understood that a film asking audiences to believe in fairy folk and magical lands rotating at the top of an enormous tree would only work if every element felt considered, textured, and real.
“He’s a mile-a-minute,” says Garfield. “He is full of a thousand ideas and so open to everyone else’s. He wants everyone’s genius to be in it, from the costume designers to the set designers, to the builders to the gaffers. You can feel it in every single texture and every single prop. In every set. He’s wonderful and he’s such a kind of highenergy, high-octane spirit himself. He’s the perfect person to be steering this ship.”
“Ben was great at making sure everyone knew the scale of what we were aiming for,” says Perkins. “The more love goes into the movie, you more you feel it on screen. So, Ben got everyone together regularly to show them all what was happening, and we screened footage for everybody on set.”
The production workshops became laboratories of invention. In one corner, craftspeople spent months creating individual mushrooms for the enchanted wood, each one different, and designed to feel like it had grown organically from Blyton’s imagination. In another, the costume department worked on the intricate details of Saucepan Man’s pots-and-pans ensemble (that couldn’t clatter in real life in the interests of recording clean dialogue) or the shimmering quality of Silky’s ‘fairiest fairy’ dress. Rather than simply receiving instructions, these artisans were encouraged to bring their own ideas, and their own sense of what these characters and worlds should be.
“You’d go into the workshops full of people making mushrooms and you’d ask, ‘Do you know why you’re making them?’” explains Gregor. “They’d say, no, they were just doing their task for the day. So, I got all these presentations we’d done for the film, and I gathered everyone together and showed them. We’d show them assemblies to let them know what the film was going to look like.”
It wasn’t about seeking approval or managing egos. Instead, it was about creating a genuine sense of shared ownership. When the mushroom-makers could see their creations on screen – when they understood how their months of detailed work served the story and the magic – they were inspired to push even further and to find new levels of craft and imagination.
Says Gregor: “What it meant was that everyone got galvanised to come up with their own ideas and it was pretty incredible. It felt like everyone was engaged, and therefore the scale of what we could achieve was much, much bigger.”
Timeless Themes, Modern Relevance
At its heart, Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree has always been about the hunger for adventure and the transformative power of imagination. But for Ben Gregor, Simon Farnaby and the creative team, the challenge was identifying which elements of Blyton’s 1940s stories would resonate most powerfully with 21st Century audiences, and how to honour the source material while making it speak to the specific struggles of modern families. Says Andrew Garfield, simply, “It’s a beautiful film about family and about love, imagination and reconnecting with the things that matter in this life.”
The answer for the team revealed itself in the contemporary crisis that parents everywhere will recognise: children’s increasing disconnection from nature, from unstructured play, and from each other, replaced by the hypnotic pull of screens and digital worlds.
“The film has an integrated heart to it about the struggle of a family to preserve the joy within their family, and to preserve it against the onslaught of technology, and all the things that parents and kids face these days to try to connect with one another,” explains Gregor. “What it really is, is an advert for doing things in real life. Everything’s on screen these days, and to go and have real experiences in nature and in places you haven’t been before, that makes you feel alive. What we wanted to do with The Magic Faraway Tree is to remind you that it’s a good idea to go out and have some fun.”
But the filmmakers were careful not to make technology itself the villain of the piece. The story they wanted to tell was more nuanced and more honest about the realities of contemporary life. “We felt it was important to stress that technology in and of itself isn’t bad,” says Harris. “In fact, Joe uses technology to help them out of one of the scrapes they get into. But it’s all about balance, and that we have to be aware of the importance in childhood of allowing kids to be out in nature. The natural world is another massive character in the film.”
This autonomy for the children in embracing nature – the freedom to explore and to make mistakes, but most importantly to discover – becomes central to the film’s philosophy. “It became more and more what the film was about,” says Gregor, “which is the kids finding all kinds of adventure in these magical worlds. Discovering confidence and finding themselves in the process.”
The fantasy elements, spectacular as they are, serve the emotional reality of a family learning to reconnect. Says Gregor: “They needed to be emotionally tied into the journey of the kids, and especially Fran, who discovers them for the first time.”
Ultimately, the film asks a question that feels urgent in our current moment: in a world of infinite digital distraction, how do we preserve the magic of childhood? How do we help children – and ourselves – remember that the most profound adventures happen not on screens, but in woods and gardens, in conversations and connections, in the unpredictable, irreplaceable experience of being fully present in the real world?
“Yes, The Magic Faraway Tree does feature a magical tree,” says Gregor. “But the message in the film is that any tree is magic. Going into the woods is magic. Spending time with your family is magic. Putting down your phone is magic. Magic is everywhere, if you look for it.”
Ben Gregor – Director
Ben’s dad took him to see Top Gun in the cinema in Beckenham when he was thirteen even though it was rated fifteen. This was an unbelievably exciting event that Ben has never recovered from. He has collaborated with Simon Farnaby (as an actor) for years on projects like Blakes Junction 7 – a short film about Blake’s 7 going to Newport Pagnell services, and All Stars a feature about dancing set inside kids’ minds. Ben’s second feature film Fatherhood won Best Feature at Soma Film festival 2018. Ben has also directed TV shows like Black Ops for BBC1 (BAFTA Winner for Best Female Comedy Performance 2024) and Brassic (BAFTA nominated Best Scripted Comedy 2025). It was working with Jez Butterworth on Sky’s Britannia that led to Ben meeting Pippa Harris and Nick Brown from Neal Street, the producers of this film. This is the first time Ben has collaborated with Simon Farnaby as a writer and it is safe to say it was easily as exciting as his Top Gun experience.
Simon Farnaby – Screenwriter + Farmer Brian
Simon Farnaby is a screenwriter, actor and author. Simon is perhaps best known for writing Wonka, Paddington and Paddington 2 alongside long-term collaborator Paul King. Simon has also written and starred in indie film comedies
Mindhorn and The Phantom Of The Open.
On the TV side, Simon is also known for his work on The Detectorists, Horrible Histories and the long-running BBC comedy GHOSTS with theatrical production collective Them There.
